said:  “All hell with the lid taken off,”—­with surroundings half rural, half urban, which for loveliness can scarcely be rivaled by any other city in the land.  Sir Henry Holland, who was of the Prince of Wales’s suite, when he visited Pittsburgh, remarked to one of the committee of reception that he had, in 1845, spent a week in an equestrian exploration of the suburbs of Pittsburgh; that he had traveled through all the degrees of the earth’s longitude, and had not elsewhere found any scenery so diversified, picturesque, and beautiful as that around Pittsburgh.  He likened it to a vast panorama, from which, as he rode along, the curtain was dropping behind and rising before him, revealing new beauties continually.  “If the business portion of Pittsburgh is a city, half enchanted, of fire and smoke, inhabited by demons playing with fire, the surrounding portion is also under enchantment, of a different kind, and smiles a land of beauty, brightness, and quiet.  The one section might be a picture by Tintoretto, and the other by Claude Lorraine.”

On the twenty-fourth of November, 1753, no human habitation stood on the peninsula between the Alleghany and Monongahela Rivers.  On that day Washington recorded in his journal:  “I think it extremely well situated for a fort, as it has absolute command of both rivers.”  In the following spring the English began the erection of a stockade here, which, on the twenty-fourth of April, was surrendered to the French under Captain Contrecoeur Who at once proceeded to the erection of Fort Du Quesne.

Round this name centres a wealth of incident, romance, and history, but no one has risen to do it justice.  Braddock’s ill-starred expedition was followed by the abandonment of the fort by the French, in November, 1758, and its subsequent rebuilding as Fort Pitt.  The fate of the little hamlet which sprang up around it was for a long time most dubious, but its position as a frontier post on the line of the ever westward-retreating Indians, and on the edge of the vast unknown wilderness, just beginning to allure adventurous pioneers, kept it from falling into the oblivion with which it was threatened by the dismantling of the fort and the troublous Revolutionary times.  Yet as late as 1784 so experienced a man as Arthur Lee, the Virginian, who had been a commissioner at the court of Versailles with Franklin and Deane, and who visited this hamlet in December of this year, said of it:  “Pittsburgh is inhabited almost entirely by Scots and Irish, who live in paltry log-houses, and are as dirty as in the north of Ireland, or even in Scotland.  There is a great deal of small trade carried on, the goods being brought at the vast expense of forty-five shillings per cwt. from Philadelphia and Baltimore.  They take in the shops money, flour, and skins.  There are in the town four attorneys, two doctors, and not a priest of any persuasion, nor church, nor chapel; so that they are likely to be damned without the benefit of clergy. The place, I believe, will never be considerable.”